How Much Server Do You Need For Hackernews + Product Hunt?

Workorder is a side project of mine. It aims to help freelancers in providing an affordable, personal order and checkout page to sell services.

On September 3rd, 2018, I submitted the site to HackerNews and Product Hunt around the same time.

Here’s the HackerNews post:

And here’s the Product Hunt one:

This isn’t my first time submitting something to either of these sites. For your reference, on HackerNews, the submission reached a high of #22 and was on page 1 briefly. For Product Hunt, Workorder reached a high of #7 and later faded from there.

It’s a well known fact that a large amount of traffic can effectively disable a website, especially if the site isn’t set up properly. The amount of traffic can reach up to several hundred visitors simultaneously and the website needs to be able to handle all of that without crashing.

As of 5 PM EST, here are the stats from Cloudflare:

As you can see, across the entire Workorder infrastructure, almost a quarter of a million browser requests were received. Most of them were cached.

Here’s a closer look at Cloudflare’s cache:

Most of the requests bounced off of Cloudflare’s CDN, saving precious server resources.

So how much server was needed?

Workorder’s application infrastructure is hosted behind a load balanced multi-webserver set up with a separate database and background workers. All of it cost about $25 USD per month at your local VPS provider split amongst the 5 or so VPSes. For landing page website itself, it’s hosted separately on another VPS — so add another $5.

Total cost, therefore, was $30 per month.

Only about 1/10th of the visitors went on to check out the app itself.

Key takeaways

So there you have it. If you’re a solo developer or in a small team and are preparing for your public launch, don’t forget these basic best practices. There are a lot of coding bootcamps out there, but few actually teach the essentials of coding deployment.

Hey YOU!

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